6 months in Estonia: What did I learn?

It’s been a while since I have written a blogpost. To be honest, I always have ideas to write something, but my schedule has been pretty busy for the past weeks: Meeting friends, working in the youth center, attending the mid-term training in a little Estonian village, attending a lot of choir rehearsals, go to singing as well as piano lessons plus writing university applications is a thing that I am doing at the moment and it’s quite challenging to keep this personal blog alive.

This month (February 2018) I spend a lot of time thinking about what has changed since I live here in Estonia. I am now living in Tallinn independently for almost 7 months and there are definitely a bunch of things that I have learned from my stay here in Estonia.

(1) Don’t underestimate self-care. It’s more important than you think it is.

In retrospective I really have to admit that I was a mess during November and December (hello winter depression!). I was not taking care of myself well, I did not understand what was happening with me, occasionally I was feeling anxious and confused because of my future, I had some toxic thoughts and all these kind of things. I was not in a good shape. And I was of course blaming myself for feeling like a mess. But at one point (that was in January) I just decided that I have to do something against these negative emotions and so I at first started writing a diary about my feels. I was writing about all the thought I as in mind and then I realiyed that I was carrying a big baggage of stories and thoughts. Then I was journaling about three questions daily. What fills me with enthusiam today? What drained me off energy today? What did I learn today? Afterwards I made a self-care list and I always go through that list when I am a bit under the weather.

To sum up, I learned the importance of self-care. It means that you take yourself seriously and respect yourself. It sometimes takes effort, but when it’s done than the outcome is happiness and satisfaction.

(2) All the good things in life take time.

This was something that I had to learn when I started going to my singing lessons, but also when I was building friendships. I am a quite impatient person and I remember I was especially in the beginning frustrated that you have to take so much time and effort to become friends with someone. I was also verz annoyed when I started singing because my voice didn’t sound like as I wanted it to sound. But I continued anyways and now I am very proud of my voice improvement.

When I was interviewing I wear* Experiment, Hando Jaksi told me that when you produce music you will always have some phases where you produce bad songs and you will have moods where you just feel that you can’t produce anything good. But you just have to try again every day and then you will for sure write something better. Because you are in the habit of it and you are persistent. And that’s exactly the attitude that I am rooting for.

(3) You are responsible for your own life.

At school I thought that there is a fixed life path that everyone follows. But coming here to Estonia and meeting all kinds of different people, I learned that there is not certain life path. You yourself have to know what you want in life and create it the way you would like to have. This is on the one hand great because it means pure freedom, but it’s incredibly scary because it comes along with a huge amount of responsibility.

(4) Happiness is a choice.

I was talking with a friend about this and we both agreed that reaching happiness in Estonia is definitely trickier because you have periods where it’s really dark and cold for a long time. Because of that, it’s not a surprise that quite a lot of Estonians drink alcohol in order to forget the negative. So in that sense you have to put more effort into feeling happy as person. Being happy in November and December was really though and I could manage it by meeting friends, going to concerts and also just to be okaz with the fact that you’re currently in a bad mood and that you just have to wait until it gets better.

Yeah, I am pretty glad that the dark winter periods are over now.

(5) Life is weird and everyone is struggling as well.

Oftentimes I am just thinking how freaking weird life is and that basically school denied to teach me that there are so many different possibilities in life. Living abroad by yourself is just a complete different experience than going to school everyday in Germany and learn a curriculum that you don’t even like. And it’s actually really cool to live abroad because I learn a new language, I dive in a culture and I meet a lot of people with all kinds of characters. I also feel like that there are a lot of weird people here in Estonia.

(6) If you really want it, you can make it.

I am occasionally afraid that I can’t fulfil my dream to become an artist and produce my own album. But after talking to quite a lot of artists I just realized that if you want it you can make anything.

….so basically, I am a becoming a strong, confident women.

Do you have any cheesy cool life insights?? Let me know in the comments!